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We are pleased to announce another step forward for open access at IUPUI.

Yesterday afternoon the IUPUI Faculty Council passed a campus-wide open access policy based on the Harvard opt-out model. This policy is an outcome of several years of persistent and creative work at IUPUI.

The policy will be implemented by IUPUI University Library Center for Digital Scholarship with support from subject liaison librarians as well as all four of our campus libraries. IUPUI's campus includes 17 schools, including the second largest medical school in the United States. This policy will increase access to a wide-range of important scholarship authored on the IUPUI campus.

The policy, which passed “unanimously,” is available from the IUPUI Faculty Council website in draft form as it was approved.

Yale University has unveiled a new digital humanities tool, Photogrammar, that visualizes and organizes photographs taken during the 1930s and 1940s under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The photographs serve as artifacts that document the yearning, despair, and humanity of Americans suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. Photogrammar allows its users to put identities and faces to American history, and reconstruct a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of what it was like to live during the Great Depression. Morning Edition, a NPR program, recently covered Photogrammar and spoke with the primary investigator of the project, Professor Laura Wexler. Professor Wexler remarks in the interview that one of the first actions users take when using the interactive map feature of the project is to look for photographs from their hometown.

Finding government information can be challenging, even for those of us practiced in the task. Uncovering government data in a form that is easily usable can be evenmore difficult, graying the hair of many a social scientist.

IUPUI's Faculty Council is currently considering the adoption of a campus-wide, opt-out open access policy. I think that's great news! If you're reading this on a screen, you should think it's great news too. Why? Because this is IUPUI; we do great work here--really. In addition to the second largest medical school in the United States, the IUPUI campus includes a lot of scholars with a passion for civic participation and community engagement. Here's a chance for us to honor those values and to give access to IUPUI's research and scholarship to any reader on the Internet. The good news is that this can be done at no cost to authors and while respecting academic freedom. For the details, read the policy: http://ulib.iupui.edu/OA

If you're not familiar with the Harvard (2008) model open access policy, it's likely that you have some questions about how all this works. Such as: What about copyright? Will this hurt my favorite journal? Why not just use PubMed Central? (Tip: check the policy documentation--where the FAQs are succinctly answered.)

As an IUPUI librarian with the Center for Digital Scholarship, this is my first blog post. I come to IUPUI from Loyola University Chicago where I just earned a MA degree in Digital Humanities. My research interests include copyright and information policies, digital literacy, digital humanities, African American history and late 19th century American history. I am really excited to get to know IUPUI and take full advantage all that Indianapolis has to offer!

On Tuesday, September 9th I will be teaching a workshop on data visualization for the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute, “Introduction to Data Visualization I: Visualization with Gephi.” For the uninitiated, Gephi is an open-source network visualization program. The tool is ideal for networks of any size. It offers a vast array of network analysis and visualization options, including geospatial layouts for data, statistical measures for social network analysis, and dynamic network visualization. Gephi handles a variety of data formats and allows the construction of datasets within the tool itself, perfect for those working with smaller amounts of data. Gephi runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.

A working group of the Research Data Alliance has proposed a case statement to develop the BioSharing Repository into a registry. Admittedly, I wasn't clear about the distinction until I read through the report a couple of times. Now that I have a better understanding of what the working group is trying to accomplish, I am eager to see how this plays out and if it can adapted in other fields. Personally, I can attest to how hard it is to find relevant standards and repositories for a particular research project. There are simply too many to know and no good way to find the ones that you or your colleagues don't know.